THE LAST YEARS
politely rural suburb in which it was in any case surprising to find him living, and as retired as a wild creature’s den.’ Mr Ward thought the portrait ‘a recognizable likeness of Barbara Rackham as she was at that time; but the interesting thing was that it made her look much more like her father than she appeared (to me at least) to do in reality; and one had the impression that he had painted himself into it, or in other words that his vision, so highly individual, was as highly subjective’.
This tallied with Mr Ward’s general impression of Rackham on that visit to Limpsfield:
‘I have the recollection of a smallish, ageing, almost wizened person, with a bald domed forehead and a very wide and elfish grin: a gnome, perhaps, though an entirely benevolent one. But there was more to the impression than that: there was something earthy and even elemental about him. … Nor would it be wholly absurd to say that he resembled one of his own grotesquely poetical trees with (as like as not) faces, for which his own face might have served as the
| Title-page drawing for The Children and the Pictures, 1907. | _P137.jpg)
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